Infinite Lives

Skip Rogers—accompanied by a pair of magical Mickey Mouse gloves—shills for the “Ultimate Remote,” a cordless joystick that, Rogers assures us, has really improved his game!

By all appearances the Ultimate is awful, but Pelikonepeijoonit confirms that its cousin, the Ultimate Superstick, is—and I quote—“TEH BOMB.”

• Everything is Terrible – Skip Rogers’ Ultimate Controller

GnamSpot, an Italian art collective, reproduced the first level of Super Mario Bros (and more specifically, the first thirty seconds of this speedrun) using beans.

GnamSpot’s Asteroids video, which uses spaghetti and tomatoes, is also super cute.

I’m hungry.

• /gamer – VOTD: First Level of Super Mario Remade Using Beans via supermariobros.tumblr.com

I was really, really unhappy I missed the IGF awards ceremony. Fortunately, several attendees described the Mega64 videos to me in excruciating detail. Here’s one of those videos!

Admittedly, it smacks of Mega64’s “I am independent” crossed with SNL’s “People Getting Punched Right Before Eating,” but it’s also better than either of those.

This is more of a Not Dead Yet alert than it is a real post. Sorry!

• Mega64 – If You’re Not Indie, F**k You via Leigh’s tweet

There were a couple moments last week, especially late at night, wherein I consciously thought, “You know what you’re doing to yourself, right? You’re going to exhaust yourself and invariably catch the GDC plague.” So now here we are—sorry about the Infinite Lives outage.

Have you ever noticed how, in the earliest episodes of the Mario Bros franchise, Mario himself has this sort of slipperiness? Almost as if the physics are different?

First, you must find the time it took Mario to fall from the edge of the ledge to the ground in each game. To do this, we opened each clip in Quicktime movie player, and using the frame by frame option, found the total number of frames it took Mario to fall. We then used the formula Time = (Number of Frames) / (Frame Rate)

Turns out that, across games and platforms, Mario’s relationship to gravity evolves thusly:

• The Science Creative Quarterly – Acceleration Due to Gravity: Super Mario Brothers via Laughing Squid